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Domain: ctw.cc

Stories and comments across the archive that link to ctw.cc.

Stories · 3

  1. DivX ;-) Deux Update

    Tech · Graphics · · posted by Hemos · from the teeny-tiny-compression dept. · 143 comments
    Epitaph writes "The author of the DivX ;-) codec (a high-quality MPEG4 codec used quite heavily by DVD pirates to recompress movies) has recently released more information about his next-generation codec: DivX ;-) Deux, or Project Mayo. MPEG4 is the future standard for internet video, and since DivX ;-) Deux is going to be free, this is a very interesting project to keep an eye on. There's now an 'Ask Gej' section where you can ask the author questions, or suggest new features for the future codec. He's also looking for coders, so help the guy out!"

  2. Idea Exchange Environment

    Internet · · posted by ryuzaki0 · from the thats-an-interesting-idea-in-and-of-itself dept. · 32 comments
    mebreathing writes: "ShouldExist.org is an idea exchange environment, where users post good ideas and then talk about them. One such idea is about the possibility of extending mp3 or id3 to contain tracks, so whole albums could be encoded into a single mp3, making them easier to find and eliminating skips between tracks. Another idea involves the new DivX codec, and making clickable mpegs that link to URLs of affiliate programs, so movie companies can release movies for free and then make their money by taking a percentage of the profits from all the consumption they induce." This shouldn't feel abnormal to anyone who has ever participated in an open source project, but its kinda nifty. I wonder if anything will come of it.

  3. Slashback: Moolah, Visuals, Geosynchrony

    News · News · · posted by timothy · from the continuing-education dept. · 78 comments
    Thanks to all of the fine folks who contributed these updates, you are in for another illuminating, invigorating, inspiring round of fruity nuggets picked from the tree of wisdom, irradiated, waxed, polished, chilled, packaged and shipped (metaphorically) to your browser. Swallow two of these a week, call if symptoms recur.

    Who needs an atmosphere? Xibalba writes "As a follow up story to the orbiting Web server, NASA already has an ftp server installed on UoSat-12 and has been sucessfully transferring images for the past week." Soon there should be no shortage of IP-addressable tin cans floating around space.

    World domination, increment 00000003707391: xaniamud writes "NVidia have released version 0.93 of their OpenGL XFree86 drivers, check it out." Hopefully, nVidia is interested enough in selling video cards to the faithful to wipe it's nose clean of GPL violations, too.

    This time, let's help DivX succeed ... Mike Hicks writes "An update to a previous story. FlashingYellow has combined with OpenCodex, and they now have a $10,000 prize along with an iMac DV for the first individual or group to produce an open source DivX ;-) plugin for Quicktime." Added to which, I will supply the second individual or group with a letterboxed DVD of Carlito's Way, Heat or The Godfather.

    You may already be a winner! You may recall that Dr. Günter Bechly recently offered a $3000 incentive to the developers of KDE if the license under which KDE is released were amended such that it could be distributed with Debian's main (free) distribution.

    Dr. Bechly has now withdrawn the offer, for the reasons he outlines below. He writes:

    "Hello, I just wanted to let everybody know that KDE did not bother to send an official answer to my offer of a donation of $3000 in case that they fix their licence problems that currently prohibits an inclusion of KDE in Debian GNU/Linux. Just two people of the KDE camp answered at all, and both basically said that the licence change is impossible to do since there is too much code of third parties (including those who sent patches) involved who can hardly be traced. This is quite interesting, since in the past most KDE representatives claimed that the licence issue is moot since the requested exception clause in the licence is implicitly given due to the fact that the KDE programmers coded KDE-software for the QT-toolkit. Now they admit that they use a lot of GPL'ed code of non-KDE programmers which have never given such an implicit permission to link their GPL'ed code to QPL'ed libraries.

    Just as a reminder: The issue is not how to use KDE with Debian (e.g. by adding the link site to apt-sources), but how to legally include KDE as free software in Debian main. The issue is also neither that KDE is indeed free software nor that QT is indeed free software, but the issue is that the two involved free licences (GPL versus QPL) are mutually incompatible, which makes any distribution of binaries of GPL'ed software that is linked to QT simply illegal! The KDE project obviously does not care at all that it violates the GPL licence of other peoples code. This is not only rude behaviour but simply unacceptable. I hoped that my offer would help to solve the problem, but the reaction or rather the non-reaction of KDE shows that this attempt failed, just like any other attempts to solve this issue before. Apparently KDE and the distributions that include KDE are relying on the mean consideration that private authors of free software will not take the finacial risk to sue them for their licence violation. Maybe the only hope for the final solution of the problem could be that one of these authors proves this consideration to be ill-founded!

    Allegations that Debian is just using the licence issue as camouflage for their general dislike of KDE are absolutely unwarranted, since I got only very positive responses from the Debian camp including the Debian leadership. There is no doubt that Debian would happily include KDE as soon as the licence problems are solved. Anyway, it does not look like that is ever going to happen. KDE unfortunately has a long tradition in violating the free software spirit:

    1.) It was founded by Matthias Ettrich who developed the very fine program Lyx, but then used the non-free toolkit xforms for its GUI, instead of e.g. using a free alternative like TCL/TK.

    2.) When the KDE project was started, it was built on a non-free toolkit, too, since QT1.x was not under QPL or any other free (open source) licence. KDE attempted from the very beginning to become the standard desktop of Linux by using a non-free toolkit. They could not know that QT would later be forced by the outcry in free software community and the attempt to develop a free replacement (Harmony) to release QT2.x under an open source licence (which unfortunately is still not compatabile with GPL).

    3.) When the free QT replacement Harmony was still in development (it achieved a rather advanced state!) the KDE project refused to agree to switch to this toolkit in the future and they even announced that they will incorporate any useful new features of future versions of QT, which made it impossible for Harmony to ever reach compatability.

    4.) KDE had no problems in the change of the licence of kisdn, which was developed under GPL, and as soon as it was accomplished was transformed into shareware. I am quite certain that they did not ask all people who sent patches for their permission for this licence change!

    5.) Finally, KDE is blatantly ignoring their constant violation of the GPL of other peoples software that is used in KDE (e.g. in kflopppy). To sum up: There is no other volunteer project in the Linux world that has shown so much disrespect and ignorance of the free software movement than KDE (just for the record: this is said by someone who used KDE since beta4 and once in a flamewar with Bruce Perens even strongly defended the KDE-project; sorry Bruce, I did you wrong!). Therefore, even though KDE is very nice and usable software, I will say goodbye to all KDE stuff and will now only use Gnome which is rapidly evolving into a comparably mature desktop environment (current Helix-Gnome is certainly as good as KDE 1.1, and forthcoming Gnome 2.0 with Nautilus will be on a level with KDE2 and konqueror). Even koffice will soon be made superflous by The Gimp, Sketch, Sodipodi, Gnumeric, Abiword, gcalender, etc. I hope that many will follow this migration from KDE to Gnome.

    My offer of 3000,- $ will not be lost for free software and will now be given to Debian for an improvement of the Debian installer. Further details will be discussed with the Debian project.

    With kind regards,
    Dr. Günter Bechly

    Dontcha love it when life imitates pundits? styopa writes "It seems that TurboLinux and Compaq Computing have announced an Alliance. Compaq will support TurboLinux on all of their platforms. Could this be the beginning of the end of TRU64?" Of course, this was carefully arranged to follow the recent story on Linux mergers, which now seems a bit more relevant. Of course, ZDNet had Compaq pegged for a date with Mandrake, but close enough.